


With Your Eyes Turned Skywards

by akathecentimetre



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Flying, Gen, Implied Relationships, M/M, Post-World War II, RAF - Freeform, Resistance, Three Times/One Time, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-31
Updated: 2018-01-31
Packaged: 2019-03-11 23:07:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13534464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: 1. LIFE (three meetings)2. DEATH (one absence)1. DEATH (three tributes)2. LIFE (one reprieve)





	1. Life/Death

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jackmarlowe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackmarlowe/gifts).



** ** ** 1\. LIFE  
** **three meetings**

He beats Collins back, and it makes him laugh. He hears a ridiculous litany of misfortune: that train delayed, and that one sent down the wrong track by accident, because it’s never nothing, moving hundreds of thousands of men, and even more so when it’s unexpected, and the elation crawling over the countryside is confused and chaotic and just a bloody good balls-up (just like in France, and so it makes him smile, makes him think of salvation, to be reminded of the utterly petrified German faces who didn’t know how to keep track of a prisoner for more than a few minutes, being so far from home). Those who ditched abandon the trains in disgust and make the final few miles on foot, still leaking Channel water, and threaten to punch the sentry on the base’s gates in the mouth if he doesn’t sod off with his demands for identification.

Farrier’s boat made landfall just a touch further north, and so he’d made his connections and made sure to swagger a bit when he came back into the mess mere hours after he’d left, made sure to conceal the very real vertigo he always felt at the sudden weight of the earth, the shift between continental and liminal, if no less real, space. He reports three out of three planes lost, and the corners of the group captain’s eyes pinch with bewildered despair, and then he comes back outside just in time to see Collins and another airman, Walker, vaulting over the swinging gate, wet in patches and disheveled sideways and stumbling over each other with fatigue, and it’s so very satisfying.

“Damn,” Collins says, and he stops short, and comes storming over to Farrier with that familiar look which says he’s very consciously choosing to love him over doing him violence. “You bastard. Couldn’t have swung round five seconds sooner?”

“Down there, were you,” Farrier says, and somehow the notion that he was being watched by his dearest critic though the whole sorry glorious lot of it doesn’t surprise him in the slightest.

“Bloody near took my eye out,” Collins says, and quickly throws his arms around him, and Farrier remembers why this is his tether to the earth.

*

He’d expected to be shot, that the first men who would appear beneath him where he dangled in the tree, wrestling with silk and straps, would be German. They are not: they cut him down from the parachute with knives sharpened on anvils and fashioned out of farmers’ pitchforks, they hustle him into clothes of dark, scratchy wool, leave his uniform smoldering and withering in a fire quickly banked and covered over with soil. They don’t tell him where they’re all going; after a while, realizing that even those who can understand English are probably helpless in the face of any accent that doesn’t belong to the BBC, he stops asking and just walks, following through the darkened, unlit backstreets of villages, rubbing the stench of his crippled Spit out of his nose.

The tea is warm – the brandy which follows is warmer, makes his toes curl within his boots (these, he has kept), and he coughs his thanks. He’s coming out of it now, the first all-obliterating shock of it, just starting to become capable of thinking _Oh, fucking Christ_ , he’s bailed into occupied Brittany and now that he’s in civvies he’s legally a spy, and if they think he’ll be able to get by on the French he remembers from senior secondary they’ll be in for a nasty shock.

«Ils boivent bien, les anglais,» one man laughs, his teeth crookedly yellow, and Collins sorts through grammar, blinking. Plural.

“Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” says a purring, casual voice from the door as it swings open and shut for the eighth time, and Farrier looks so entirely at home, so suited to this absurd beating back of the dark with pistols and radios and scrawled chalk and ink, that it somehow makes perfect sense.

*

The tea rooms Collins had once known in London are still half-rubble, but the owner, a sweating, middle-aged man with his hands coated in brick dust, ushers them in nonetheless and manages to put together a decent service. Farrier hasn’t missed rationing, but at least it’s better than ersatz, and Collins sniggers at him when he wolfs down the horrible brown bread with its thin filling of mock fish paste.

“What?” he asks, with his mouth full, and knows he has hit upon something when Collins’ face instantly quietens, how there is still that edge of empathetic pain at the back of his eyes when he looks at Farrier at all. He is promoted, after all, four stripes on his sleeves, likely to be one of the few group captains kept on after demobbing; Farrier knows he is slight in comparison, left skeletal, in togs which don’t fit and barely a rank to his name, and he hates that Collins thinks that its anything to do with him.

Contrary to what he guesses is public perception – or at least the perception looking back at him right now, which is all he cares about – he doesn’t have a death wish, nor had he ever, and he’s not entirely sure how to convey that nothing ever bloody mattered but that he was alive, grasping for it, fucking proud of it, and so he puts a hand on Collins wrist and lowers his head into a raised-eyebrow stare.

“If you don’t stop it,” he says seriously, “I’m going to make you eat everything on this plate.”

“God, spare me,” Collins said, and smiles.

“And then I’ll tell you about all the _many_ fantastic dishes you can make out of rat and a bit of bootlace.”

“Fuck off,” Collins grins, and all of him relaxes, as though he hadn’t quite known how to believe it until now, that they are both alive and here.

 

  **2\. DEATH  
** **one absence**

Five minutes, they say. _You just missed him_. The runways are empty and the warm air rising from the ground smells like petrol.

He waits. He’s never been good at it. He paces and smokes and tells the lieutenant who wants him to report to the group captain’s office to fuck off, because he’s not going to talk about it now, not about that final push of squaddies down the beach, all scrawny wheeling arms and cracked screams in the last effort to grab a few minutes’ cover for the boats, how he’d dropped and scrabbled and come up running with sand in his mouth. Not about how slow the boats were, how very slow, and how ponderous and uncomprehending, even of heroism, were the looks on the fishermen’s wrinkled faces, how sour the tea full of accidental splashes of seawater that they held out until he took it.

There hadn’t been room to pace then, with Dover looming up into the morning, but there is now, and so Farrier does it, listening for Merlins.

They come back limping, half of the wing down and the other half battered. _Last sortie_ , they’d said, _then it’s England_. Last chance to be too late, and now he is, because Collins was probably too tired, still damp and cramped and squinting from sleeping in a train before he’d been thrown back aloft, and the ones who’ve made it back at last say there was no chute.

_Best of luck_ , Farrier’d said, and then he’d stolen it all for himself.

He stamps out his cigarette, mutters something meant to bring damnation down on them all, and goes to bed.

*

1/2

*


	2. Death/Life

** 1\. DEATH  
** **three tributes**

All he’d have to have done was ditch. Throw open the canopy, tilt himself out; thrash in the water for a minute, undignified, spluttering, until a thick-gloved hand grabbed him by his collar and pulled all six foot of him and his unbearable lip into some trawler from Hastings, stinking of fish scales.

Collins thinks of that often, that decision not taken. He’s thinking of it now, as the Thames burns below him and every flash of ack-ack makes stark the shape of his dented propeller, guttering in front of him.

 _Fuck you, Farrier_ , he says, and, not quite grinning, dives for the nearest Heinkel.

*

He’d believed, for a long time – still almost believed it, decades on – that he’d have been the one to not have a grave. He’d never thought it possible to trust the word of a German when it came to Geneva and POW camps, even for officers, even when it was still early on and they practically bowed and scraped, each and every one of them thinking it would be over soon.

Five years he waited, and by the end he almost longed for a ditch to die in, when the guards disappeared and the food stopped arriving and they were all hungry, desperate men, ransacking empty offices looking for maps and clothes and bullets, wondering how they’d ever make it far enough west for it to be of any use.

He’d gotten letters for the first six months or so. _Chin up, you great git_ , they’d said, and he’d remembered it daily, remembered that sharp-edged fondness, sounding like the borderlands and the smallest hint of a Glasgow kiss.

After that, they’d stopped coming.

Bayeux is pretty even when grey and hunched in on itself, in the winter of 1953, and he goes and stands over the memorial to those from the Commonwealth with no known grave, and thinks that perhaps this is best, this fit – this place across the water where Collins died, beckoning him on, as though they are both still flying out to liberate the lost.

*

It comes as a Red Cross parcel, more than battered around the edges, a flap of blue cloth showing through a ripped corner. Inside, the uniform has been stripped of epaulettes and stripes; the ragged threads of their absence still dangle.

Collins wonders if it still smells like him, and knows that here, in the mess, with the curious, fidgeting crowd looking over his shoulders at what the Germans say is left of Farrier slipping into a state of half-dizzy anger and regret, he can’t risk finding out.

He gives it back, gives it into someone else’s hands to take away from him, and keeps just one thing, tucked into his palm: a chip of glass from a flying helmet, its edges worn smooth and tinting washed out, knowing just what sort of idle, deliberate movement kept it warm.

It’ll never be enough, but if it's what’s on offer he’ll guard it, defying anyone to make a greater claim.

 

 ** 2\. LIFE  
** **one reprieve**

They drum him out of flying ops in 1941, saying they can’t risk losing him, and that he could do more good blooding others; he is considered too old, at twenty-six, to be run down any further. He does feel old, or he did – he’d felt stretched thin and translucent when he’d first come back north to the training bases, and had done a lot of walking, in those first few weeks, reminding himself what real Scottish cold felt like, how low slanted the sun, how bracing and violent was the sea, before he’d managed to drag his body out of its spiral. He would not crash and burn, he told himself, certainly not here, and, eventually, he kept that gritted word.

The young cadets are being trained up faster and faster, and he’s one of the ones who’s doing it. Every month they average fewer and fewer sorties before they die, and yet still they come, coltish, thinking him cruel, not understanding. If he were to think about it too hard, he would contemplate desertion, for being asked to prepare lambs for slaughter.

Farrier laughs at him for this, though never harshly. His is the power of reassurance, from his secure place on the ground, his gammy leg propped up beside him. Technically an acting group captain, he prefers to be outdoors, away from bloody desks, and says rude things about Collins’ techniques and briefings and makes the cadets hide furtive smiles.

Collins doesn’t mind, given that he’s there at all. Every time he’s asked about what happened to him in France, he tells a slightly different story, even to Collins, even when they’re alone. Collins suspects that the prisoner exchange was as dull as any pen-pushing, half-hearted diplomatic matter ever was: the circumstances of the wound, he knows, are not something Farrier believes are worth anybody knowing. He thinks he understands that, thinks he understands why Farrier doesn’t give a damn who knows what, because it doesn’t change the fact that he’s unlikely to ever fly again, and that ignoring the source and history of the problem makes it seem, at least to those who don’t know him, that its consequences don’t matter.

Collins takes them both up in a Defiant one morning, an old banger heavily patched up after the loss of most of her sisters in the summer of 1940, when there is still enough sun to call it autumn and Farrier sits in the half-open gun turret behind him, saying nothing over the wind.

“You’re still coming off your lines too soon,” is all he says when they are back on the ground and taxiing bumpily through the damp grass, and when Collins looks back at him it’s clear to see that he’s taking the piss, and all is somehow right with the world.

*

2/2

*

**Author's Note:**

>  _For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return._ \--- Leonardo da Vinci


End file.
